Tony- In my opinion IPS is the same thing as IDS... And there are other companies, and have been other companies in the past that provide this type of service. Pilot network services was a company that a good friend of mine worked for. They went out of business because of poor management, but they had a system that was an IDS as well as what this company is calling an IPS. In that if the IDS saw that there was x number of alarms coming in from a specific IP, it would send the appropriate commands to the firewall router to block that IP.

I recently worked on a job where we used ISS and NetIQ to accomplish the same thing. Not really groundbreaking, but a good way to do things.